World Wide Words -- 15 Jun 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 836           Saturday 15 June 2013
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Hippodroming.
3. Plasticarian.
4. French fries.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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CROSSPATCH  Several readers disagreed with my statement that it was 
unnecessary to spend time on the first part of this word and asked 
why "cross" should mean ill-tempered. The Oxford English Dictionary 
entry suggests that it evolved through terms such as "cross-wind", 
one blowing at an angle to the desired course and which impeded 
progress. It was attached to ideas or actions that were contrary or 
opposed to one's own and to people who opposed or disagreed or were 
quarrelsome. The specific sense of bad-tempered came from that.

HANDICAP  Several British readers wondered if there might be a link 
with the pub game of spoof, played to decide who buys the next round 
of drinks. It's too complicated to explain here, though in essence 
it involves guessing the total number of coins held in the hands of 
all the participants (if you would like a detailed description, you 
will find it here: http://wwwords.org?SPOOF). A connection seems 
unlikely, but you never know. 


2. Hippodroming
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Reader Bill Woodruff serendipitously encountered this curious word. 
A dictionary of a century ago defined it like this:

    hippodrome, To conduct races, equestrian, pedestrian, 
    or aquatic, or other contests, in which the result is 
    prearranged by collusion between the managers and the 
    contestants, in order to make gain through betting.
    [The Century Dictionary, Volume 4, 1895.]

To confirm the validity of the dictionary's definition, I offer this 
newspaper report in evidence:

    Much interest was manifested in the races on Saturday, 
    as it was expected that they would be real genuine 
    contests of speed, instead of what they proved, some very 
    poor hippodroming. ... The fraud was so palpable and 
    barefaced that the only wonder was that the judges didn't 
    send them all to the stable, declare the pools off, and 
    teach these fellows a lesson that would last them for some 
    time.
    [Daily Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana) 18. Sep. 
    1878.]

The original hippodromes were chariot-racing circuits of classical 
Greece (the term is from "hippos", horse, plus "dromos", a race or 
course). The term was imported from France to Britain in the early 
nineteenth century for a related spectacle and was later applied in 
Britain to a theatre that offered a varied bill. Hippodromes, these 
days conventional theatres, survive in some British cities, notably 
London, Bristol and Birmingham.

In America travelling entertainments from the middle of the century 
often advertised themselves grandly as hippodromes after the French 
model. An early example was Franconi's Hippodrome, which ran in New 
York for two seasons in 1853 and 1854. Contemporary illustrations 
show that this featured indoor chariot races in a circuit similar to 
those of ancient Greece. The idea was taken up by travelling shows, 
which often advertised themselves as both circuses and hippodromes. 
As the original circus was the Roman equivalent of the hippodrome, 
that sounds like an etymological tautology, but they were different 
entertainments. The circus rings featured the familiar animal acts, 
clowns and acrobats and were surrounded by a hippodrome track.

Since the races on these hippodromes were designed as entertainments 
rather than serious sporting contests, we may guess that who won and 
lost was supervised by the management to maximise the pleasure of 
the audience. (British televised wrestling in the 1970s was run on 
the same principle.) When serious contests were fixed, it wasn't a 
huge jump for people to call the practice "hippodroming". 

The first examples date from the 1860s. A direct link with horses 
was quickly lost, since early examples refer to boxing, athletics 
and other sports. In the twentieth century, car and aeroplane racing 
were added. The term was still occasionally to be found as late as 
the 1970s. 


3. Plasticarian
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This word - it means a person who tries to avoid plastics - suddenly 
appeared from nowhere last weekend in a British newspaper and has 
since been widely picked up by news outlets worldwide:

    When Thomas Smith, a chemistry PhD student from 
    Manchester, was given a plastic lid for his takeaway tea 
    by the staff at his university café, he had a novel 
    comeback. "I can't take that," he said. "I'm a 
    plasticarian."
    [Independent on Sunday, 9 Jun. 2013.]

Part of the stimulus for it was a report by the UK's Royal College 
of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists the previous week that advised 
pregnant women to avoid food in plastic containers where possible. 
This was precautionary advice that referred to endocrine disrupters 
found in some plastics which can disrupt normal fetal development. 
Another reason for wanting to avoid plastics is their adverse effect 
on the environment. For this reason, a few people have been trying 
to live without them, though it has proved almost impossible because 
the stuff is everywhere.

"Plasticarian" is generated from "plastic" by adding the "-arian" 
ending that creates adjectives referring to systems of thought or 
belief, such as "humanitarian", "libertarian" and "vegetarian", 
though it's rare in asserting opposition rather than acceptance. 
I've had one sighting of the noun, "plasticarianism".

The earliest example that I know of in this sense is this:

    Becoming a plasticarian will affect my life and my 
    diet, but that is the point. I want to see how integrated 
    this disposable plastic is in our convenient lives.
    [http://disposableplastic.blogspot.co.uk, 15 Jul. 
    2012.]

There are a couple of usages in Google Groups from a decade ago but 
the meaning is the inverse - somebody who has an interest in or a 
liking for plastics.


4. French fries
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Q. A friend of mine recently asked whether "French fries" should be 
capitalised. This sparked some debate about the origin of the term. 
Is the word "French" an indication of the origin of the dish or is 
it a shortening of "frenched", a method of cutting up vegetables 
into long thin strips? Or should we just call them chips? [James 
Tapper]

A. Never chips please, neither in the US nor the UK. American chips 
are what we British call crisps, while our British chips are usually 
shorter and more chunky than French fries. The long, thin ones are 
commonly called fries almost everywhere. I'll return to "frenched" 
later but the convention is to write "French fries" with an initial 
capital letter, because it's widely believed that they originated in 
France. However, in French-speaking Europe some hold that they were 
originally Belgian, while some Americans argue for a strong link 
with their own country.

One story is that French fries were first called that by American 
soldiers in Belgium and France towards the end of the First World 
War, who encountered them as "pommes frites" and converted that into 
French fries. This is folk etymology - the term was known earlier.

Another tale connects the dish to an early US president, Thomas 
Jefferson. Marshall Fishwick (in his article The Savant as Gourmet 
in Modern Culture in 1998) and Charles Ebeling (in an address to the 
Chicago Literary Club in 2005) say that the concept was introduced 
by him. The latter was told by a guide at Monticello, Jefferson's 
home in Virginia, that a recipe of 1802 exists in Jefferson's own 
handwriting. A widespread story online asserts that it refers to a 
request to his French chef Honoré Julien for "potatoes served in the 
French manner" and speculates that Jefferson may have got it from 
his period as ambassador to France. Anna Berkes, Research Librarian 
at Monticello, tells me that there is a recipe, probably dating from 
Jefferson's presidential period, which mentions "pommes de terre 
frites, à crû en petites tranches" ("Potatoes, raw, in small slices, 
deep-fried"). This is a description in French of fried potatoes but 
not obviously a description of potatoes fried in the French manner. 
Nobody associated with the Jefferson archives knows of the request. 
Like chips or fries the story is best taken with a pinch of salt.

A French manner of serving potatoes was certainly described a little 
later, though the early references I can uncover are British, not 
American. Mrs Margaret Dods, who ran the Cleikum Inn at Innerleithen 
in Scotland, was immortalised in Sir Walter Scott's novel St Ronan's 
Well of 1823. In 1828, in The Cook and Housewife's Manual, she noted 
that "The French fry sliced potatoes in goose-dripping, which has a 
very high relish; but before serving, drain them on a towel before 
the fire." A decade later a detailed description appears:

    FRENCH METHOD OF COOKING POTATOES  They divide into the 
    thinnest possible slices the potatoe [sic], raw, not 
    boiled, and fry it in the finest olive oil or fresh 
    butter. It then eats crimp, like the finest biscuit, and 
    is taken, like our fried potatoes, with a dish of flesh, 
    although also frequently, according to the French fashion, 
    it is eaten separately, as a salad.
    [Freeman's Journal (Dublin, Ireland), 1 May 1838. Note 
    the old sense of "eat", to have a certain consistency when 
    eaten.]

"Crimp" means crisp or brittle. These don't sound like the French 
fries we now know - it would seem the French were serving something 
nearer the potato crisp. A recipe from Eliza Warren - a British 
writer who was a contemporary and rival of the much better known Mrs 
Beeton - may be describing the same thing. In her Cookery for Maids 
of All Work in 1856, she is the first recorded user of the term by 
which the dish would be known for the next half century, "French 
fried potatoes". Her recipe says: "French Fried Potatoes. - Cut new 
potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; 
fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain". Both sides? 
That does sound more like a crisp than a French fry. (It may be the 
version I've come across in American recipe books under the name 
"cottage fries"). However, a very early American recipe in Miss 
Parloa's New Cook Book of 1882 under the heading "French fried 
potatoes" specifies, "Pare small uncooked potatoes. Divide them in 
halves, and each half in three pieces. Put in the frying basket and 
cook in boiling fat for ten minutes." I'm told this chunky version 
is known in the US as "country fries" or "potato wedges".

When O Henry wrote in 1894, "Our countries are great friends. We 
have given you Lafayette and French fried potatoes", he would seem 
to have been under a misapprehension. It is clear that the essence 
of the French manner to non-native cooks was that the potatoes were 
deep-fried, which is after all what "frite" means in French. It 
seems that Americans took over the French style of deep-frying 
potatoes but initially used it for chunks rather than thin slices 
and only later changed the shape to the one we now recognise.

The first American reference I can find to the dish under the name 
of "French fried potatoes" is in the Burlington Daily Hawk Eye of 
Iowa for 12 December 1880. The name began to be abbreviated to 
"French fries" around the beginning of the twentieth century (the 
first explicit mention I can find is in a newspaper of 1902).

As to "frenched" (a North American term better known elsewhere as 
julienne, which by the way has no connection with Jefferson's chef, 
being about three centuries earlier than his time), this certainly 
describes vegetables cut into thin strips. But the earliest evidence 
for "frenched" is much later than that for "French fried potatoes", 
suggesting it was either borrowed from the way that the potatoes 
were sliced or was an independent introduction. Either way, it is 
usual not to capitalise "frenched".


5. Sic!
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Roger Clark found this in the Globe and Mail of Toronto on 8 June: 
"Dr. Varki had given a lecture on the molecular differences from 
chimpanzees that might have made humans unique, when Prof. Brower 
pigeonholed him and told him that he was asking the wrong question."

A momentary slip on the CBC news site on 11 June was caught by Nigel 
Johnson before it was corrected, "Secret files reveal more Canadians 
using offshore tax heavens."

"A colleague of mine," Rupert Snell wrote, "recently published an 
article whose highlight for me was this challenging phrase: 'and in 
another corner of the public sphere ...'."

My mole at the BBC, Anthony Massey, reports: "On 7th June, the Queen 
opened our new headquarters at Broadcasting House. As part of the 
usual security precautions, the Metropolitan Police searched the 
building in advance of her visit. Two police vans appeared, labelled 
rather alarmingly 'Explosive Search Dogs'. We all stood well back 
while they did their work!"

Three's a crowd ... Paul Braithwaite found this headline on Yahoo! 
Sports on 7 June: "Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Adam Scott paired 
for first two rounds of U.S. Open."

Department of Inconsiderateness. TVNZ reported on 6 June: "A lot of 
people's email addresses had changed, unfortunately some people had 
died and not let us know." Thanks to Ruth Reeves for that.


6. Useful information
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Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
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